Exploring the Crossroads of Art, Craft, Reading, and Creative Writing with Alisa Golden

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Writing Tiny Stories

A little world exists in a few words. The most famous tiny story is the six-word story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."* While the word choice is important to create the story, the spaces between the words are actually what gives the story life. The reader must infer or imagine if this story is a plain advertisement or a tragic tale. Because the story has gotten so much acclaim, we must infer that it is a tragic tale.

Many people have seized upon the gimmick of a six-word story and written what they think is a story, but not as many have actually succeeded encapsulating a world. Breaking it down, bit-by-bit we have first "For sale." Someone doesn't want or need something, s/he desires to either make money and/or get rid of the shoes. "Baby shoes" is next. We assume that either the shoes have been outgrown or someone has a shoe store. "Never worn" tells us the shoes are new. The reader realizes that either the baby was never born or that the baby has died. A relative must be selling the shoes, perhaps the mother or the father. Change has occurred. Tragedy in six words.

One reason it works is that a conflict is set up and developed. The concepts rub against each other and create a scene. "For sale" is general and familiar and gives us the desire. "Baby shoes" gives us a person to imagine, either the baby or a parent. "Never worn" creates the context and tells us that something actually happened.

Peggy Gotthold of Foolscap Press recently created a book of six six-word stories by six writers. I also think that just one six-word story has great potential to become book art. The book itself can provide the setting and the tone with color, texture, binding, and pacing.

Let's see how writing a six-word story might work. We'll try for subtext: we should be able to read the story on more than one level of meaning. Let's start with three questions:

what is desired?

who/what is involved?

what is the outcome or consequence?

This is harder than I thought it would be. Some kind of gain or loss seems to work.

*This is attributed to Hemingway. The story is that he wrote it on a napkin, but no one has been able to verify that these were actually his words and that the event actually happened. In any case, we do have the six-word story, which has sparked much imagination and many contests. Snopes.com has one explanation.

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About Me

Alisa Golden is the author of Making Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures & Forms (Lark Crafts, 2011), and Painted Paper: Techniques & Projects for Handmade Books & Cards (Lark Books, 2008), among others. She makes books under the imprint never mind the press and teaches bookmaking and letterpress printing at California College of the Arts. She holds a BFA in printmaking from California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA), and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Her stories, poems, and art have been published widely, and she founded and edits the online and print magazine, Star 82 Review.

Golden is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. Earned fees are recycled back into books reviewed for blog posts.